World: Be on high alert. Guard your children. Americans are frightened again.

I suppose security will be worse now at our airports, and the little Mussolini’s that work for the jobs program called TSA will be super-vigilant. The humorous part of that is if there really were non-American terrorists set to inflict harm on us, all they would have to do is blow us up while we wait in the queue to have our balls x-rayed.

This is a restatement of a point from the comments down below, without personal references. It has to do with what Ellul described as the destruction of the intellect due to agitation propaganda. Anyone my age or younger is a victim of it, for us older folks going all the way back to the 1950′s. In essence, the long-term effects of agitprop are for one part of the thought processing system to flourish, another to recede. In a state of constant fear, it is the amygdala that takes control and the whole of one’s existence is fear-response to fear. That is the primitive brain, the survival, fight/flight-survive-at all-costs-brain. It’s very hard to dislodge those thought processes, but I clearly remember in 1988 when I realized that Ruskies presented no threat to us, never had, and then breathing a huge sigh of relief, as decades of fear-mongering was suddenly lifted. And I was only lucky.

The cerebral cortex, where reasoning takes place, does not have much control in a fear-based environment, as we all know when faced with a crisis situation. I pretty much see the whole of the USA, post-9/11, as living in fear and not processing information properly, not that good information is even available. So while it appears when viewing the Democrats in action, or the Tea Party or listening to talk radio that humanity is a very stupid lot, we are only viewing fear at work. High intellectual capacity exists in almost all of us, but emotions override reasoning powers in an agitprop environment, which is unrelenting in our country.

They key to defeat of any system of propaganda, as always, is simply to be aware that it exists. Once that happens, it loses all power – even becomes the subject of wonderful humor, as in the old Soviet Union. Stop being afraid!

That won’t happen, of course. And the words above, if they strike too close to home, will be called “psychobabble.” But ask yourself what intellectual capabilities you exhibit when you think there is a burglar in the house.